CURRENT POETRY SCENE: CIVIL WAR

The fragmentation of the poetry world has
been accelerated by literary critics who have shifted their stance
to accommodate the coterie aspirations of poets.

The argument is either 1a. we think the
critics unbalanced in concentrating on (and vehemently championing)
their narrow views to the exclusion of the larger picture. Or 1b.
we think the critics have double standards in adjusting the criteria
according to whatever poet or movement is under consideration. Or,
if neither is the case, then 2. we are obliged to accept that there
are no common standards, only a civil war between autistic poetry
communities unable to understand each other.

Background

First some uncomfortable facts. British
poetry declined in importance from the eighteenth century,
and had ceased to be the most important literary genre by
the mid nineteenth. From the end of that century to the 1930s,
only some 15 poetry books of any significance were published
each year in England. Seventy percent of borrowings from public
libraries were prose fiction, and not much of the remaining
thirty percent was poetry. The 10,000 copies subscribed before
publication of a new volume by Stephen Phillips were a publishing
phenomenon, but still only a tenth of those achieved by Lorna
Doone in 1897. General periodicals like The Cornhill,
The Nineteenth Century, Longmans and Murray's
Magazines published a little poetry, and new literary
magazines like The Yellow Book generally had limited
circulations and short lives. Poets could support themselves
on their poetry even less than they do today, there being
no poets in residence, public readings or interviews on the
radio and TV. {1}

What did spring up were coteries of
poets and writers, more in England than the USA, and particularly
in London. There were the usual disagreements but the Moderns
were not personally at odds with the Georgians: they mixed
with them socially and found much to admire in their work.
Pound was asked to contribute to Georgian Poetry, and
Eliot's poetry was liked by Munro and others. {2} We should
not paint too rosy a picture, but exchanges like this were
not published:

"Why is that?

-- Because most mainstream poetry today is simply unreadable,
and people quite sensibly ignore it. For example, intelligent
readers skip past the poems in The New Yorker in order to
peruse the much more inviting articles and advertisements.

It seems that you dislike the poetry in The New Yorker.

--They haven't published an interesting poet since Dorothy
Parker and Ogden Nash." {3}

Or:

"When he was a young man, Ezra Pound scribbled a sonnet
every morning before breakfast. He had the good sense to
throw the whole lot in the fire. A poet doesn’t have to
believe the Muse keeps appointments to see the virtues of
regimen; and yet there’s something pillowy and fin de siècle
in Robert Bly’s self-imposed discipline, to write a poem
every morning before rising. Morning Poems has a dozy complacency
(you feel some of it was written before waking). The book
is composed in simple, declarative sentences, full of “wisdom”
and “sentiment,” as if these were ingredients found in any
supermarket; and like a Disney cartoon they’re full of talking
mice, talking cars, talking cats, talking trees. The poems
peter out at sonnet length, the appetite for poetry exhausted
where the appetite for breakfast begins.

One day a mouse called to me from his curly nest:
“How do you sleep? I love curliness.”
“Well, I like to be stretched out. I like my bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off over there.”
“I suppose that’s one way,” the mouse said, “but I don’t
like it.
The planets don’t act that way, nor the Milky Way.”
What could I say? You know you’re near the end
Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings in the Milky Way.

This could hardly be more winsome or sickeningly ingenuous.
After a few such trifles, just Aesop without his dentures
(I’m especially fond of the talking wheat), a reader might
feel he had wandered into a children’s book by mistake."
{4}

Or this:

"Let me be specific as to what I mean by "official
verse culture"--I am referring to the poetry publishing
and reviewing practices of The New York Times, The Nation,
The American Poetry Review, The New York Review of Books,
The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), Antaeus, Parnassus, Atheneum
Press, all the major trade publishers, the poetry series
of almost all of the major university presses (the University
of California Press being a significant exception at present).
Add to this the ideologically motivated selection of the
vast majority of poets teaching in university, writing and
literature programs and of poets taught in such programs
as well as the interlocking accreditation of these selections
through prizes and awards judged by these same individuals.
Finally, there are the self-appointed keepers of the gate,
who actively put forward biased, narrowly focused and frequently
shrill and contentious accounts of American poetry, while
claiming, like all disinformation propaganda, to be giving
historical or nonpartisan views. In this category, the American
Academy of Poetry and such books as The Harvard Guide to
Contemporary American Writing stand out." {5}

Underneath there were many reservations, but it took the
ascendancy of Modernism to get Robert Graves in his 1965 Oxford
Addresses on Poetry, to talk openly about 'the foul tidal
basin of modernism.' {6}

The
New Criticism

Even before that battle was
joined, literary appreciation had begun its drift into
academia, possibly with Scrutiny, where F.R.
Leavis applied
the approaches of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and
William Empson in a more sustained manner. "For
Leavis and his followers, analysis was not merely a
technique for precise description of literature, but
a process whereby the reader could 'cultivate awareness',
and grow towards the unified sensibility. Analysis was
necessary because a poem resulted from a complex of
associated feelings and thoughts. A great poem was not
a simple, forceful statement of some well-known experience,
'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd',
but a profoundly original creation only fully comprehended
after close textual analysis. Because of these attitudes,
the practical critic spent his time discovering complexities,
ambiguities and multiplications of meaning. He was attracted
to irony and wit, because a poem with these qualities
offers different layers of effect for interpretation.
Long, discursive poems, such as Paradise Lost, which
depend for much of their organisation on rational analysis,
were undervalued, and the critics tended to treat all
poems, and even plays and novels, as akin to lyric poetry
in their structure of imagery. " {7} Many critics
disliked the approach. "Helen Gardner and C. S.
Lewis have pointed out that a student can be taught
a technique of analysis, and do well in examinations,
without any real appreciation of poetry whatsoever.
" {8} "Kermode's book is particularly famous
for its attack on Eliot's dissociation theory. . . the
whole theory has no historical justification. The theory
was produced by Eliot as an attempt to define what he
himself was trying to achieve in verse; it should never
have been used as an historical truth determining the
way in which poems are analyzed." {9}

But poets kept up the running.
"Literary critics are rarely under fire and never
tested by the high seas of artistic creation. Instead,
as John Updike puts it when titling his own collected
essays and reviews, they "hug the shoreline" of accepted
practices and ideals. Their potshots are taken from
behind the cover of their age's standards, and the long
progress of the history of ideas." {10}

Academic
Champions

Academic careers could now be carved
out of contemporary poetry, provided a substantial body
of new critical theory could be generated, and poets found
to exemplify its revitalizing insights. W.B. Yeats was clearly
one of the greatest of twentieth century English poets,
and a spate of books and articles sought to bring him into
the fold. {11} {12} {13} But if Yeats knew Pound well, but
he didn't fully sympathize with his work, or always understand
it. {14} Yeat's writing grew terser as he emerged from the
Celtic twilight, and his interests widened to include the
problems of contemporary Ireland, but still his preoccupations
remained very un-Modernist: Symbolist images of swans, water,
moon and towers, a brooding on the imaginative, inner life,
a mannered style with uncontemporary diction.

Perhaps Thomas Hardy, whose
style had hardly changed from the 1870s, could be repositioned?
{15} David Perkins, whose survey of a hundred years
of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic is truly admirable
 well-researched, generous and perceptive 
did his best, but found himself in difficulties. Writing
of The Dynasts, he says: "Later he speaks
of the "smart ship" and "smart"
may be pejorative, but he also calls it a "creature
of cleaving," responding positively to this adventurous
swiftness. Throughout the poem his attitude is never
settled, but wavers and hovers, balancing one phrase
against the next. Many phrases are of the kind readers
find 'trite" and "awkward", but they
are not less effective for that reason. Triteness and
awkwardness are here felt as reassuring human ordinariness,
a plain honesty of utterance as Hardy records an almost
mute depth of feeling and groping uncertainty what to
think." {16}

But surely triteness is triteness: why not admit that
Hardy was an imperfect craftsman, both in prose {17}
and verse? The comment of the Saturday Review on
the first appearance of Wessex Poems  "As
we read this curious and wearisome volume, these many
slovenly, slipshod, uncouth verses, stilted in sentiment,
poorly conceived and worse wrought, our respect lessens
to vanishing point" {18}  is harsh, but perhaps
not far from the truth.

Because that would mean accepting
other standards, older standards, and Modernism
was a jealous god. Argument shifted. Hardy refused to
lose himself in conventional sentiment or well-turned
phrases. Hardy was deeply hurt and perplexed by life,
and such honest doubts and comfortless broodings represented
the age. Hardy's poems were simple and direct, written
without Classical trappings or Romantic attitudinizing.
We understand Hardy more through biography than his
poetry or novels, and no doubt all poets would be closer
to us if textbooks included their less admirable aspects:
Hardy's misogyny, {19} Yeats's calculated affectations,
{20} Eliot's ambition that encouraged his wife's association
with Russell but had her committed when his career was
threatened, {21} Pound's philandering and anti-semitism,
{22} and so forth.

From
Diversity to Disunity

So what happened to the broad
church of Modernism? Perhaps it never was a movement
as such, only poets reacting in their own ways to individual
circumstances. Perhaps poets remained unconvinced by
the theory created to help them, finding it abstruse
and over-ingenious: many are the stories of Eliot bemused
and chuckling over Ph.D. theses on his work. And perhaps
the subterfuges that critics adopted to fight a worthy
cause came back to haunt them. Which of these passages
do we prefer?

It is the time of tender,
opening things.
Above my head the fields murmur and wave,
And breezes are just moving the clear heat.
O the mid-noon is trembling on the corn,
On cattle calm, and trees in perfect sleep.

Or:

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

I have some doubts about both,
but the first seems better in its observation and rhythmic
control. But of this piece David Perkins says: "The
poems of both Phillips and Field have been completely
forgotten; to recall them may seem unkind, almost gloating.
Nevertheless, since they were once esteemed, they show
what, at a level of taste and intelligence below Watson's,
the middle class assumed "poetry" to be. One
can find in Phillips the plaintive "simple,"
mealymouthed style that has been fondly read for at
least the last two hundred years." {23}

The second comes from Robert Frost's Two
Tramps In Mud Time, which appeared in his 1936 collection
A Further Range. {24} Stronger writing, but from
what seems to me a bad poem: gallumphing metre, unabashed
clichés (cloven rock, poised aloft,
hulking tramps), contrived rhyming, and a moralizing
tag to boot. But in discussing Frost generally, Perkins
says "When in the twenties and thirties the Modernist
tide came in, Frost remained prominent. The excellence
of his performance ensured that. But most of the contemporaries
with whom he had been and should be associated were
lost from view. As a result, when we look back on twentieth-century
poetry, Frost seems a relatively isolated and inexplicable
figure." {25} Possibly so, but aided by some selective
reading.

Is Perkins arguing something like the following: Modernism
was a healthy reaction to the badness of late nineteenth-century
poetry. As Stephen Phillips was popular at the time,
his poetry must be bad. I will show that to be the case
by selecting some particularly egregious example.

I do not know, of course, but the approach is common
and unhelpful. Could we gain a proper idea of Yeat's
1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems
from this snippet? {26}

Greater glory
in the sun,
An evening
chill upon
the air,
Bid imagination
run
Much on the
Great Questioner;
What He can
question,
what if question
I
Can with a
fitting confidence
reply.

At Algecirus  A Meditation
Upon Death is a fragmentary
piece where Yeats's legendary playing
of sense against the metre ends
up with an over-pat phrase. A failure,
but no reason to deny the stunning
accomplishment of the collection
as a whole.

Poets need to be judged on their best work, when most
will declare for Frost. But unless we think the Phillips
piece that Perkins chooses to single out for attack
is self-evidently bad  and it doesn't so seem
to me  we must wonder why the standards that apply
to one poet do not apply to another. If we don't stigmatize
a leading academic as incompetent or dishonest, what
is left us? That the literary scholar's task is perhaps
not to review, which is a matter for the small presses
and their endless squabbles, but to:

1. explain and find an audience for the poet or poets
under study.

2. research into the bases of criticism, and so look
into literary theory and contemporary philosophy.

3. dethrone the elitist and monolithic criticism of
the past with its lofty and supposedly universal standards.

Contemporary
Battles

In a widely-read study of contemporary
poetry, Vernon Shetley quotes
a passage from Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Supernatural Love,"
a poem that appeared in her apparently "highly praised"
volume The Lamplit Answer: {27}

I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth "Beloved," but my needle caught
Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, "Daddy daddy"--
My father's hand touches the injury

As lightly as he touched the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ's when I was four.

criticizing it for rhythmic monotony and triviality, adding:
"Good metrical writing involves a great deal more than
filling out a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables
with occasional variation." And: "New Formalist
partisans often accuse free versers of being obscure or inaccessible,
but readers also turn away from triviality, and one may be
trivial (as indeed one may be obscure or inaccessible) in
measured as well as free verse."

True enough, but why is such a large argument is being built
on one poem? Not all New
Formalist work is so over-written. Vernon Shetley goes
on to say ". . . the connection between using conventional
verse forms and these various populist impulses seems even
more elusive. Poetry is not likely to regain its lost popularity,
much less its lost cultural authority, by attempting to compete
directly with popular culture, or by attempting to match the
accessibility of popular cultural goods. And in a world where
younger professors of literature, not to mention younger poets,
often appear to be only hazily informed about the principles
of versification, it's difficult to see how metrical composition
will, by itself, engage the interest of a broad, nonspecialist
public." {28} True again, very probably, but poetry by
those whom Vernon Shetley discusses  Elizabeth Bishop,
John Ashbery and James Merrill  has been no more popular.

Sensible
Reviewing

The death of poetry, or its
decline into an institutionalized subculture {29} has
been lamented for half a century, and in other sections
of the site I try to show that there is much to enjoy
in the newer strains of literary production, just as
there is also much to doubt. Poets do expect readers
to understand what they are attempting, however, and
this is something reviewers will more generally concede.
Joyelle McSweeney, writing in the Constant Critic
Review, {30} may not identify with the working class
views of the collection she is reviewing, but she places
the poetry accurately, comments on its strengths, and
draws attention to its effective use of fragmentation
and cross-cutting techniques. Balanced, readable and
enlightening. Similarly, Jordan Davis, {31} commenting
on the reissue of poetry by Lorenzo Thomas, places Thomas
with the Umbra poets, and the New York School/Poetry
Project scene: information we need if we are to read
him properly.